Antibiotics, in the past, have transformed human health and saved millions of lives. Now, as a result of overuse, they are no longer working.

"The golden age of medicine has come to an end."

by Joe Shute of The Telegraph.

A story of some Pigs:

Needwood House Farm is easy to miss. Only a small sign - the bright pink image of a pig - suspended from a fence post hints at anything of significance down the one-way track that leads off the main road.

After a few hundred metres of bouncing over mud and gravel, it is the pungent smell that smacks you first. Then, the sound; the squealing, grunting and growls of 5,000 pigs crammed into this corner of rural Staffordshire.

A hundred or so piglets are excitedly clambering over each other or snuffling around the muddy floor of the gated outdoor enclosure where they are waiting to be transported for slaughter. Inside the great barns, 500 sows lie side-by-side in pens while their offspring fight for space at their teats.The air hangs heavy with ammonia, so thick it stings the lungs.

This is the flagship operation of Midland Pig Producers, which runs nine farms across the country producing 80 tonnes of meat a week to supply Tesco, Marks and Spencer, Waitrose and Asda. It is big. But only a few miles away over the border into Derbyshire, something even bigger is planned.

A decision is expected shortly on Midland Pig’s so-called Foston Mega Farm, which will house 25,000 intensively reared indoor pigs, making it one of the largest in Europe.

The proposal has attracted huge opposition, with more than 20,000 letters from across the world.

Pig welfare is, of course, an emotive issue. But campaigners insist that something greater is at stake here - something that the Chief Medical Officer has referred to as one of the greatest threats of the 21st century, alongside terrorism and climate change, and which this spring, is expected to be placed on the national risk register.

Such farms rely on the use of antibiotics for sick animals, but as we rush to produce industrial quantities of ever cheaper food, we have sleepwalked into a human health crisis.

I think we all know that people who go to the doctor with the sniffles or even something more serious, are inclined to put the doctor under strong moral pressure to give them antibiotics, when it is a fact that antibiotics only work on bacteria and do not work on viruses or parasites or many other simple ailments.

While this is a problem, it is a much greater problem that antibiotics are given routinely to the animals that we eat as meat and this pathway adds to the resistance that these pathogens are building.

Very soon the hospital acquired infections or ( HAI -strains ), of super-bacteria like MRSA and C-Difficile are no longer going to be curable as we are fast running out of antibiotics that can handle them.

Now that many other strains of bacterias are becoming antibiotic-resistant we are soon going to be in a very dangerous situation.

HERE is a list of bacteriums, viruses, parasites and fungi that are already immune to, are resistant to and/or are starting to grow resistance to the commonly-used antibiotics.

They have been talking about this for yonks but nothing has been done about it.

What we need is doctors that do not give in to moral pressure and antibiotics banned from the farmyards unless every use is for the treating of infection in animals that are going to feed us eventually.

I think that these two actions might save us from situations where people are going to start dying again from simple infections.